How Do You Stay?

How do you stay with someone who did you dirty? That sentence doesn’t even really reach the depth of what betrayal is. What do you do with someone who set your life on fire? With someone who lied to you for almost 2 decades? Someone with who you shared a life who hid something they knew you wouldn’t approve of, which is why they hid it of course.

Can humans truly forgive such a heinous crime? People say they forgive murderers. Do they though? Can you truly ever forgive someone who infringed such awful upon you? I’m not sure. I wonder if over time the hurt just becomes less sharp so it feels like forgiveness.

Forgiveness according to Berkley.edu:

Psychologists generally define forgiveness as a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness.

Not having resentment just means not having negative feelings toward them anymore. Not having vengeance is that you don’t want harm to become them. So what do you do when you don’t have feelings of resentment or vengeance anymore, but you’re also not sure how to move forward? How do you move forward while sitting with the grief and the injustice of what this person dumped on you? Can you ever truly move forward?

I recently read an article about the 10–10–10 decision. To think about a decision’s impact in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. How we may be hurt now and the decisions we make now will impact our lives in the long term, not just the short term. Maybe that’s what you focus on. You can always change your mind. I don’t really appreciate this option I’ve been given. I was raised in a very black-and-white household. Marriage = good. Divorce = bad. But there’s gray. In almost every decision and life choice there is a lot of gray.

Maybe it does help to think about things in smaller chunks and not lifetime lengths anymore. I will probably still be married in ten minutes. It’s the 10 months and the 10 years which is terrifying. I feel like I’ve lost control of my life. I felt so certain that I’d be married until one of us died, now I’m not too sure I’ll still be married in 10 months. How does one live like that? How does one live like life may fall apart every minute?

It seems safer to just pull the plug and be done. To have control over what you can control which is building a life on your own. Trusting someone that you trusted who clearly didn’t deserve to be trusted seems like insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, is insanity. Well, doing this just one time more. I don’t have any more insanity left in me beyond one more chance. Where will I be in 10 months? I wish I knew.

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